Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  ‘I’ve got an emergency!’ Jocundra called back, hoping to inject an appropriate desperation into her voice. ‘One of the orderlies! It’s his heart!’

  ‘I don’t see no doctor with you. Can’t let you by without no doctor.’ He waved her back to the house.

  ‘Get out!’ hissed Donnell. ‘Convince him!’

  She climbed out. ‘Please,’ she said, pressing against the bars. ‘He’s had a coronary!’

  The guard’s eyes flicked to her breasts. ‘I wish they’d get them damn phones straightened out. Awright.’ He punched a button set into the masonry, and the gate whined open a foot. He slipped inside, and she stepped out of his way, standing at the front of the van while he slapped the magnolia branches aside and shone the flashlight in the window to check on Donnell. Jocundra heard a rustle from the bush behind him and saw a pair of blazing green eyes emerging from the welter of white blossoms and waxy leaves. ‘This ol’ boy ain’t no orderly,’ said the guard, and something swooshed through the air and struck his neck, then struck again. Jocundra jumped back, coming up against the gate, and the guard fell backwards out of sight behind the van. In a moment Richmond stood, stuffing the. guard’s gun into his belt. Jocundra moved out onto the road, putting the bars between them.

  ‘You better be scared, lady,’ he said, and laughed. ‘When you motherfuckers made me, you created a monster.’

  He ducked back into the bush, then came around the front of the van, holding his guitar. Underlit by the headlights, his face was seamed and gruesome; his eyes effloresced. Donnell climbed down, limped to the gate, and pushed the button. The iron bars swung open. ‘Pull it on through,’ he said to Richmond.

  As Richmond drove the van out, the moon sailed from behind the clouds and everything grew very sharp and bright. The gate whined shut. Pearly reflections rippled over the side of the van; the road arrowed off toward the swamp, a bone-white strip vanishing between dark walls of cypress, oak and palmetto. Fresh mosquito bites suddenly itched on Jocundra’s arm, as if the moon had broken through her own cloudiness, her confusion, illuminating her least frailty. She did not want to be with Richmond. The road was a wild, unreckonable place crossed by devious slants of shadow.

  The guard moaned.

  ‘Hurry up!’ yelled Richmond.

  Donnell was doing something to the lock mechanism, molding voluptuous shapes in the air around it with his hands; he stopped, apparently satisfied, stared at it, then stepped over to the wall and jabbed the control button several times.

  The gate remained shut.

  ‘Man, I can handle this road at twice the speed,’ said Richmond from the back of the van. ‘She’s drivin’ like a fuckin’ old lady.’

  ‘She’s got a license,’ said Donnell patiently. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Listen, man!’ Richmond stuck his head up between the seats. ‘It was cool you runnin’ the show when we was inside ‘cause you could deal with the cameras and shit, but I ain’t…’ He nearly toppled into the front as the van hit a pothole, then he fell back. ‘Look at this shit! She’s gonna kill our ass!’

  ‘Quit yelling in her ear, damn it! How the hell can she drive when you’re yelling at her!’

  Hearing them argue, Jocundra had a moment of hysteria, a happy little trickle of it eeling up from her depths, and all the unhappy particulars of the situation were bathed in a surreal light. There they sat like TV hoodlums planning a spree of Seven-11 stick-ups and high times, fighting over who was boss - to further this impression they were both wearing sunglasses which Richmond had stolen from the orderlies - and there she sat, the mute flunky, the moll. At length they agreed on a compromise: Donnell would serve as the mastermind, while Richmond would take charge in situations calling for swift action and street smarts. Donnell asked her if she knew a place nearby where they could be safe for a couple of days.

  ‘The swamp,’ she said. ‘It’s full of deserted shanties and cabins. But shouldn’t we get as far away as possible?’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Richmond, disgusted. He scrunched around on the floor; his guitar banged hollowly. ‘I’m gonna lay back for a while. You deal with her, man.’

  ‘You weren’t listening,’ said Donnell exasperated.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was concentrating on the road.’

  ‘We’re going to switch license plates. They’ll expect us to run, I think, so we’re going to stay nearby, maybe pick up another car. The swamp won’t do. We need someplace near a town, within a couple of hours’ drive. That’s how long the gate and the phones should stay out.’

  ‘Well, over on Bayou Lafourche there’s a stretch of motels,’ she said. ‘Mostly dumps. I doubt they pay much attention to who their customers are.’

  ‘Make it some place near a liquor store,’ said Richmond. ‘I need to get fucked up!’

  When they reached the state highway, Jocundra boosted the speed to fifty and raised her window. Wind keened in the side vent. White houses bloomed phosphorescent among the brush and scrub pine; gas stations with broken windows and boarded-up restaurants. Near the town of Vernon’s Parish they passed a low building with yellow light streaming from its doors and windows, a neon champagne glass atop it, surrounded by cars. Black stick figures, armless and faceless, jostled in the doorway, and their movements made them seem to be flickering, pulsing to the blare of light around them like spirits dancing in a fire. Then they were gone, the moon was occluded, and a wave of unrelieved darkness rolled over the van. Richmond chorded his guitar.

  ‘Past the road to Vernon’s Parish

  Our tailpipe was sprayin’ sparks.

  The preacher in the Calvary Church

  Felt cold fingers ‘round his heart…’

  The song and the air of stale, forced confinement in the van reminded Jocundra of traveling with Charlie’s band. When he had described it to her, it had sounded romantic, but in reality it had been greasy food and never enough sleep and being groped by Quaaluded roadies. The only good part had been the music, which served to mythologize the experience. She glanced at Donnell; he rested his head wearily against the window as Richmond’s cawing voice wove into the rush of the highway.

  ‘Now if you see a fiery fall

  Of comets in the East,

  Or the shadow slinkin’ ‘cross the moon

  Of some wiry, haggard beast,

  If you feel your blood congeal

  And you’ve the urge to call a priest,

  Never fear, it’ll disappear,

  You can rest tonight in peace.

  ‘Well, you might want to run outside

  And fall down on your face,

  You might scream or you might pray

  Or you might vacillate,

  You might give the United Way,

  But no matter what you done,

  I tell you, straight,

  You can’t escape the fate

  Of Harley David’s son!

  Oh, the days they’ve swept away from me

  Like fires through a slum.

  But when I die I’ll roam the night,

  The Ghost of Harley David’s son!

  ‘Bullshit song,’ said Richmond, dejected. He leaned between the seats. ‘But what the hell, squeeze! It sure feels good to be hittin’ the highway again.’ He punched Donnell’s arm and grunted laughter. ‘Even if we never did feel it before.’

  Chapter 9

  May l7 - May 19, 1987

  A stand of stunted oaks hemmed in Sealey’s Motel-Restaurant against the highway. Bats wheeled in the parking lot lights, and toads hopped over the gravel drive and croaked under the cabins, which were tiny, shingle-roofed, with peeling white paint and ripped screen doors. Mr Sealey - Hank Jr according to the fishing trophy on the office desk - was squat and glum as a toad himself, fiftyish, jowly, wearing a sweat-stained work shirt and jeans. He hunched in a swivel chair, showing them the back of his seamed neck and gray crewcut hair, and when they asked for a room he spun slowly around; he closed his right eye, squinted at Jocundra through the trembling lowered lid
of his left, clucked his tongue, then tossed them a key and resumed tying a fishing fly large and gaudy enough to be a voodoo fetish. Donnell pictured him clad in scarlet robes, dangling said fly into a fiery pit from which scaly, clawed hands were reaching.

  ‘Don’t want no screechin’ or bangin’ after midnight,’ grumbled Sealey. ‘Take Cabin Six.’

  The cabin, twelve dollars for two singles and a cot (‘You got to tote the cot yourself) was no bargain, being the home of moths and crickets and spiders. ‘All things small and horrible,’ said Donnell, trying to cheer Jocundra, who sat eyeing with disfavor a patch of mattress, one of several visible through holes in the sheet, dotting it like striped islands in a gray sea. For light there was a naked light bulb hung from the ceiling, fragments of moth wings stuck to its sides; between the beds stood an unfinished night table whose drawer contained no Bible but a palmetto bug; the walls were papered in a faded design of flesh-colored orchids and jungle leaves, and mounted cockeyed above the bathroom sink was a flyspecked Kodachrome of Lake Superior.

  Though it was poor and pestilent, Richmond made Cabin Six his castle. He cracked the twelve-pack he had bought from Sealey, chugged the first can, belched, and threw himself on the bed to chord his guitar and drink. After three beers he suggested they go for a ride, after five he insisted upon it, but Jocundra told him they were low on gas. Disgruntled, he paced the cabin, interrupting his pacing to urinate out the door and serenade the other cabins with choruses of his song. But when Donnell reminded him that rest was necessary, he grumpily agreed, saying yeah, he had to fix up some stuff anyway. Sitting on the bed, he shook his guitar until a rolled-up piece of plastic fell out; he unrolled it, removing a scalpel. Then he emptied the security guard’s gun and began to notch the tips of the bullets. At this Jocundra turned to face the wall, drawing her legs into a tight curl. ‘Sleep?’ Donnell perched on the edge of her mattress. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘You should, too.’ ‘I want to go over Magnusson’s notes a while.’ Dark hairs were fanned across her cheek. He started to brush them away, a tender response to her vulnerability, but he suddenly felt monstrous next to her, like a creature about to touch the cheek of a swooning maiden, and he drew back his hand. He had a sensation of delicate motion inside his head, something feathery-light and flowing in all directions. His breath quickened, he grasped the bedframe to steady himself, and he wished, as he always did at such moments, that he had not witnessed the autopsy or read Magnusson’s morbid self-descriptions.

  He stayed beside Jocundra until the sensation abated, then stood, his breath still ragged.

  ‘You wanna kill the light, squeeze,’ said Richmond. ‘I’m gonna fade.’ He poured the bullets into an ashtray.

  Donnell did as he was told, went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Gray dirt-streaked linoleum peeled and tattered like eucalyptus bark, shower stall leaning drunkenly, chipped porcelain, the mirror stippled with paint drippings, applying a plague to whomever gazed upon it. The doorframe was swollen with dampness, and the door would not close all the way, leaving a foot-wide gap. He hooked his cane over the doorknob, lowered the toilet lid, sat and tried to concentrate on the ledger. According to Magnusson the bacterial cycle was in essence a migration into the norepenephrine and dopamine systems; since his ‘psychic’ abilities increased as the migration progressed, he concluded that these systems must be the seat of such abilities. So much Donnell could easily follow, but thereafter he was puzzled by some of Magnusson’s terminology.

  … each bacterium carries a crystal of magnetite within a membrane that is contiguous with the cytoplasmic membrane, and a chain of these magnetosomes, in effect, creates a biomagnetic compass. The swimming bacteria are passively steered by the torque exerted upon their biomagnetic compass by the geomagnetic field; since in this hemisphere the geomagnetic field points only north and down, the bacteria are north-seeking and tend to migrate downward, thus explaining their presence in the sediment underlying old graveyards. Of course within the brain, though the geomagnetic field still affects them, the little green bastards are bathed in a nutrient-and temperature-controlled medium so that movement downward is no longer of adaptive significance. They’re quite content to breed and breed, eventually to kill me by process of overpopulation.

  Richmond’s heavy snores ripped the silence, and Donnell heard footsteps padding in the next room. Jocundra eased through the gap in the door; she had changed into jeans and a T-shirt. ‘Can’t sleep,’ she said. She cast about for a clean place to sit, found none, and sat anyway beside the shower stall. She spread the folds of the shower curtain, examining its pattern of hula girls and cigarette burns, and grimaced. This place is a museum of squalor.’

  She asked to see the ledger, and as she leafed through it, her expression flowing from puzzlement to comprehension, he reflected on the difference between the way she looked now - a schoolgirl stuck on a problem, barely a teenager, worrying her lower lip, innocent and grave - and earlier when she had entered the cabin; then she had appeared self-possessed, elegant, masking her reaction to the grime beneath a layer of aristocratic reserve. She had one of those faces that changed drastically depending on the angle at which you viewed it, so drastically that Donnell would sometimes fail to recognize her for a split second.

  ‘I didn’t believe you… about extending your life,’ she said excitedly, continuing to pore over the ledger. ‘He doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implication - I think - is that you may be able to stabilize the bacterial colony

  ‘Magnetic fields,’ said Donnell. ‘He was too much in a hurry, too busy understanding it to see the obvious.’

  ‘There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense. All this about NMR, for example.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nuclear magnetic resonance.’ She laughed. ‘The reason I almost flunked organic chemistry. It’s a spectro-scopic process for analyzing organic compounds, for measuring the strength of radio waves necessary to change the alignment of nuclei in a magnetic field. But Magnusson’s not talking about its analytic function.’ She turned a page. ‘Do you know what these are?’

  There were three doodles on the page:

  Beneath them Magnusson had written:

  What the hell are these chicken-scratchings? Been seeing them since day one. They seem part of something larger, but it won’t come clear. Odd thought: suppose the entirety of my mental processes is essentially a letter written to my brain by these damned green bugs, and these scribbles are the Rosetta Stone by which I might decipher all.

  ‘I see them, too,’ said Donnell. ‘Not the same ones, but similar., Little bright squiggles that flare up and vanish. I thought they were just flaws in my vision until I saw the ledger, and then I noticed this one…’ He pointed to the first doodle. ‘If you turn it on its side it looks exactly like an element of the three-horned man Richmond drew on his guitar.’

  ‘They’re familiar.’ She shook her head, unable to remember where she had seen them; she gave him a searching look. ‘This is going to take time, and Richmond doesn’t have much time.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Maybe we should go back to Shadows. With all the resources of the project…’

  ‘Richmond knows he’s nearly terminal,’ said Donnell sharply. ‘He won’t go back, and I have my own reasons not to.’

  For the first time since Magnusson’s death, he had an intimate awareness of her unencumbered either by doubts about her motives or by the self-loathing he felt when he was brought up against the fact of his bizarre existence. Her face was impassive, beautiful, but beneath the calm facade he detected fear and confusion. By escaping with him, she had lost herself with him, and being lost, as she had rarely been before, she was at a greater remove from her natural place in the world than was he, to whom all places were unnatural.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘This and that,’ he said. He took back the ledger and read from the appendix. ‘“Mitochondria research has long put forward the ide
a that human beings are no more than motile colonies of bacteria, so why do I shudder and think of myself as a disease in a borrowed brain?” That, too.’

  The subject obviously distressed her. She looked away and ran her eye along the mosaic of dirt and faded pattern spanning the linoleum. “There wasn’t anyone at Shadows who’d subscribe to a purely biological definition of the patients,’ she said. And she sketched out Edman’s theories as an example, his fascination with the idea of spirit possession, how he had snapped up the things she had told him about the voodoo concept of the soul, the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange.

  ‘The part about your influence on me,’ he said. ‘Do you buy that?’

  A frail pulse stirred the air between them, as if their spirits had grown larger and were overlapping, exchanging urgent information.

  ‘I suppose it’s true to an extent,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think it means anything anymore.’

  Sleep did not come easily for Donnell. Lying on the cot, he was overwhelmed by the excitement of being away from Shadows, by the strange dissonance everything he saw caused in his memory, at first seeming unfamiliar but then wedding itself to other memories and settling into mental focus. Triggered by his excitement, he experienced a visual shift of an entirely new sort. The moonlight and the lights of the other cabins dimmed, the walls darkened, and every pattern in the room began to glow palely - the grain of the boards, the wallpaper, the spiderwebs, the shapes of the furniture - as if he were within a black cube upon whose walls a serpentine alphabet of silver smoke had been inlaid. It frightened him. He turned to Jocundra, wanting to tell her. Both she and Richmond were black figures, a deeper black than the backdrop, with fiery prisms darting inside them, merging, breaking apart; like the bodies of sleeping gods containing a speeded-up continuum of galaxies and nebulae. The screen mesh of the door was glowing silver, and the markings of the moths plastered against it gleamed coruscant red and blue. Even when he closed his eyes he saw them, but eventually he slept, mesmerized by their jewel-bright fluttering.